Comic Con and the Scribes

(This is cross-posted from Lee Goldberg's blog. That's a picture of Alan Dean Foster and Lee on the left)



My daughter Maddie and I left the house yesterday for Comic Con in San Diego at 5:30 am and walked through the door of the convention center at 8:30. The Scribe Awards weren't until 2, so we roamed around the exhibition floor for a few hours.

The Scribe Awards and Tie-In Panel was sparsely attended at first, but by the time we were mid-way through, we built to nice-sized crowd. Our 2008 Grandmaster Alan Dean Foster gave a thoughtful, and very funny, speech on the lack of respect tie-in writers get from the publishing industry and their fellowAlan Dean Foster and Lee Goldberg writers, despite the huge success of tie-in books. He applauded the International Association of Media Tie-In Writer's efforts to change that and to increase the awareness of tie-in writing in the mainstream media.

Other panelists included Andy Mangels, Max Allan Collins, Steve Leiva, Kevin J. Anderson, William Dietz and Stacy Deutsch. I must admit, though, that I was distracted for much of the panel by an audience member who had long hair and a beard on one half of his face and was bald and clean-shaved on the other. I couldn't help thinking that he was a man born to drive Adrian Monk insane...

The Scribe Nominees and Winners (noted with asterisks) are below:

BEST GENERAL FICTION ORIGINAL

CSI NY: DELUGE by Stuart M. Kaminsky
**MR. MONK AND THE TWO ASSISTANTS by Lee Goldberg
MURDER SHE WROTE: PANNING FOR MURDER by Jessica Fletcher & Donald Bain
CRIMINAL MINDS: JUMP CUT by Max Allan Collins

BEST GENERAL FICTION ADAPTED

**AMERICAN GANGSTER by Max Allan Collins (nominee & winner)

BEST SPECULATIVE ORIGINAL

LAST DAYS OF KRYPTON by Kevin J. Anderson
**STARGATE ATLANTIS: CASUALTIES OF WAR by Elizabeth Christensen
STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION - Q&A by Keith R.A. DeCandido

BEST GAME-RELATED ORIGINAL (SPECIAL SCRIBE AWARD)

HITMAN: ENEMY WITHIN by William C. Dietz
FORGE OF THE MINDSLAYERS by Tim Waggoner
**EBERRON: NIGHT OF THE LONG SHADOWS by Paul Crilley

BEST SPECULATIVE ADAPTED

RESIDENT EVIL: EXTINCTION by Keith R.A. DeCandido
52: THE NOVEL by Greg Cox
**30 DAYS OF NIGHT by Tim Lebbon

BEST YOUNG ADULT ORIGINAL

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER: THE DEATHLESS by Keith R.A. DeCandido
GOODLUND TRILOGY: VOLUME THREE: WARRIORS BONES by Stephen D. Sullivan
**NANCY DREW AND THE CLUE CREW #10: TICKET TROUBLE by Stacia Deutsch & Rhody Cohon

BEST YOUNG ADULT ADAPTED

**THE 12 DOGS OF CHRISTMAS by Steven Paul Leiva (nominee & winner)

Trek Stuff

From Keith DeCandido's blog) As many of you probably know, a bunch of new Star Trek prose projects were announced at Shore Leave 30 this past weekend. Full news stories can be found at Trek Today, TrekWeb, and TrekMovie.com.

I already posted the covers to A Singular Destiny and Mere Anarchy. Here's what else of mine was announced:

There will be another Corps of Engineers compilation next year, Out of the Cocoon, which will be published in December 2009, and which will include four eBooks (the title story by William Leisner bill_leisner, Honor by Kevin Killiany, Blackout by Phaedra M. Weldon [info]meharet, and The Cleanup by Robert T. Jeschonek and a new minipedia compiled by me. (The current plan is to try to do two trades per year that collect eBooks. We'll get Mere Anarchy and Out of the Cocoon in 2009. Still to come are Slings and Arrows and the final three COE volumes, What's Past, Turn the Page, and Remembrance of Things Past.)

In August 2009, there will be an anthology called Seven Deadly Sins. This will feature seven novellas picking an alien species (or, in one case, an alternate universe) that represents one of each of the seven deadly sins.

Big surprise -- I'm doing the Klingons, who represent wrath. Can't say much about the story just yet, but I can say it'll be my first time writing 23rd-century Klingons, which I'm looking forward to.

Here's the whole lineup:

Pride: the Romulans, by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore
Envy: the Cardassians, by James Swallow
Wrath: the Klingons, by Keith R.A. DeCandido
Sloth: the Pakleds, by Jimmy Diggs
Greed: the Ferengi, by David A. McIntee
Gluttony: the Borg, by Marc Giller
Lust: the Mirror Universe, by Britta Dennison

River Runs Red Cover

I saw that the cover for my new supernatural thriller River Runs Red (Penguin/Jove, October) was starting to show up at various places online--but it's the early "solicitation" cover, and it has Brian Keene's generous quote from the front of Missing White Girl on it instead of the correct David Morrell blurb, so I thought I'd post the right version here. The book earned some lovely blurbs from other writers who I'm honored to be linked with in print, and which I'll share at another time. RRR is the second book in the loosely linked "border trilogy" that began with MWG and ends next year with Cold Black Hearts. You might have to click on the picture to enlarge it enough to read... (Crossposted from Jeff Mariotte's blog)

The Fix: Behind the Music and an Excerpt

A month from now my first Burn Notice book, The Fix, will be released into the wide world. I'm already well into writing the second book and thinking about the third one, too. It has been an odd process for me for several reasons, not the least of which being that I am typically a pretty slow writer, tend to agonize over every word and have a micro manager's attention to detail as it relates to marketing, art and advertising. I've been spoiled in a way because with Simplify, for instance, my great publishers at OV Books actually listened to my rants and things worked really, really well. (And it should be noted: I am hoping to have good news shortly about my new collection of stories.) With The Fix, it was an entirely different experience. I wrote the book in about 70 days. I have no micromanaging tendencies concerning anything with the art or marketing, particularly since its hard to complain about television ads running on USA, a huge web presence on USA's site and assurances that the book will be in every store in the known universe. Unlike my previous books where I've toured the nation, I'm doing a limited amount of touring this time around -- I'll post the schedule shortly, but it's primarily in the west -- focusing mostly on mystery and crime book stores, which have always shown me a tremendous amount of support for my previous books, and festivals. The reality is that this book will probably sell itself. The other reality is that my ego won't allow me to stay home and hope that happens.

I would be lying if I said writing this book wasn't a challenge. It absolutely was. I've never written a traditional crime novel. Anyone who has read my work in the past will tell you that linear storytelling isn't exactly my calling card. Nor is having a narrator who is reliable. Of course I've written linear work in the past. And of course I've written reliable narrators in the past. But one thing I don't think I've ever written is a hero, even an ironic hero like Michael Westen. My characters tend to be pretty fucked up and of course Michael is fucked up in his own way, too, but not in the "he may have killed his wife and daughter" sort of way. The challenge for me was to convey him on the page in a way that made me enjoy writing him and also was true to Matt Nix's creation.

Which brings up another challenge: I had to remember to be funny. My tendency in writing fiction is the opposite of what I do here on this blog. And of course this blog isn't even really me -- it is some blog version of myself, some stylized version of my life and opinions (I don't say the word fucktard all that often, really) -- so if you pick up a book of mine looking for whatever is you find here, you're going to be disappointed. One of the more common things I hear when I meet people at book signings and such is, "I bought your book thinking it would be really funny. But this is really different. It's serious!" Which I guess is the hazard of keeping a blog. At any rate, I gave myself the freedom with The Fix to let go of some of my literary pretension, leaving that for the short fiction I wrote this year, and hopefully found a voice that would give readers what they want in terms of the humor of Burn Notice.

After the book comes out, I'll post some other interesting stuff about the book -- including a little bit about the Easter Eggs I put in the book, which will be part of a contest I'll run here for people who happen to be fans of the entire family of Goldberg siblings and can spot all of the allusions I've made to previous works by all of us -- including some stories about the actual writing of scenes and such (there is one notable scene that occurred while I was literally freezing to death in Vermont).

Until then, Penguin has posted a pretty extensive excerpt -- the entire first chapter -- here. The spacing is a little funky in places -- some of the dialog gets shoved together in odd ways -- but it will give you a nice flavor for the book.

(Crossposted from Tod's blog)